The Mad Women of the Moors
Re-experiencing The Brontë Sisters, Part One
In 2024 I read Brontë’s Agnes Grey alongside the Literary Life Podcast. I hadn’t read a Brontë novel in years, more than a decade I believe. Though I greatly appreciate the Brontës, I’ve always been more of a Jane Austen girl. It’s a rare reader who loves both equally, I find. The Brontës wrote Gothic revival tales with a flare for romanticism (romanticism the movement, not romanticism featuring a meet-cute and happily ever after), whereas Jane Austen wrote satire. The Brontës make me sad and despair for humanity while Jane Austen makes me laugh at society’s nonsense. All four women had much to say about the world around them, they just said it very differently.
Agnes Grey, written by the youngest Brontë, Anne, is not the most riveting of classic works and I suspect it wouldn’t still be in print if Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre weren’t currently so popular. I love to pair reading experiences, rabbit trail from one book to another, an exercise of associative reading, so I plucked a book I already had on my shelf and read it as well.
The book was The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell, a contemporary literary mystery with the meet-cute kind of romance thrown in. The book follows fictional character Samantha Whipple through Oxford as the author fan-girls over Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In a season when I am aggressively purging subpar books from my collection (we have over 5,000 volumes–I stopped counting long ago–and have legitimately run out of space) The Madwoman Upstairs is one I have chosen to keep, for now. I think my oldest might enjoy it after studying a Brontë book or two, it’s an easy breezy weekend novel.
That time might be coming soon as the trailers for this new Wuthering Heights movie blasts across the internet, appalling most readers I know. Teaching Wuthering Heights just moved up my to-do list as I counter parent pop culture, so that when my teen encounters the story for the first time it is not at the hands of the debaucherous movie industry who is advertising what looks like a Fifty-Shades version of what they are calling the “greatest love story ever told.” I thought it was a cautionary tale of what happens to humanity when we give into the monster of sin instead of slaying it. On a supernatural level, Wuthering Heights brings me back to Beowulf (I might be broken, because everything brings me back to Beowulf, it’s a favorite) and the torment of the wild (sin nature and Satan… Heathcliff has that whole Esau archetype going for him that reminds me of Grendel). On a psychological level, Cathy and Heathcliff remind me that sin nature is to be quashed lest we wander the moors ever after as lost souls unable to reach heaven. Apparently, that is not the popular reading, and Hollywood has turned it into some steamy lip biting panty dropper. Gross. But, I haven’t read the book in a coon’s age, and it’s possible I read it poorly and just saw the message I wanted to see.
Alice Hoffman said, “Read Wuthering Heights when you’re 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero; when you’re 30, he’s a monster; at 50 you see he’s just human.” When I was in my teens, I definitely read him as a tempting monster. I know I read Jane Eyre and Tenant of Wildfell Hall in my twenties, but I cannot recall if I re-read Emily’s work when I first read her sisters’ and stumbled across Gaskell’s biography. I’m 41 now and I’m curious to know how I read Heathcliff today.
English author Jeanette Winterson wrote on her website in 2011:
I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed, Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched by Cathy’s death-wish (Why did you betray your own heart?). Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child I understood his humiliations, his ardour, and his capacity to injure. I also learned the lesson of the novel that property is power. It seemed to me that if you want to fall in love you had better have a house. Whatever Emily Bronte was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel of all for love and the world well lost. Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right. Therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (and that is part of her plan but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Much later when her daughter marries Heathcliff’s horrible son Linton he gleefully claims that all her property is now his – and when he usefully dies, all that was hers passes to Heathcliff. Heathcliff himself starts with nothing—and so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom belonging to the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin. What’s love got to do with it? (All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story).
As I begin my journey of rediscovery, I find I agree that it is a story of loss. I also think it is a story of revenge, and possibly a story of ghosts… I’ll get back to you in Part Two of this blog series.
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Anakalian Whims 